"I don't want to lie about the way it is"
On eight discs chock full of truth, the late Kirsty MacColl gets the career-spanning box set she deserves
She was the daughter of a legendary folk singer and the wife of one of rock’s top record producers. She wrote the song that made Tracey Ullman a star. U2’s 1987 breakthrough album The Joshua Tree starts with “Where the Streets Have No Name” and ends with “Mothers of the Disappeared” because she sequenced it that way. She ran with a crowd that included Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Billy Bragg and Shane MacGowan, all of whom—even the redoubtable Moz—praised her and acknowledged that she was their artistic equal.
And yet Kirsty MacColl barely achieved a fraction of the fame and fortune that Ullman or the Smiths or the Pogues (let alone U2) enjoyed. It’s possible that this might have changed in the 21st century; as the 1990s turned to the 2000s, she seemed to be reaching an important new juncture in her career. But a tragic accident in the waters off Cozumel, Mexico, on December 18, 2000 foreclosed any such eventuality. On a family vacation, diving with her two teenage sons near a coral reef, MacColl was struck and killed instantly by a speeding powerboat. Her last act was to push her elder son out of the way, ensuring his survival. She was 41.1
Twenty-three years later, with the cooperation of MacColl’s estate, Universal Music Recordings has released See That Girl, an eight-CD set that, unlike the many single-disc compilations issued since her passing, covers the entirety of her musical life. You’ll find her first known studio recording here—backing up father Ewan MacColl and stepmother Peggy Seeger on acoustic guitar for an exuberant 1976 take on Seeger’s “Darling Annie”—as well as her final TV appearance, performing the droll, salsa-flecked “In These Shoes?” on the BBC’s Later … with Jools Holland in April 2000. Although all 21 of MacColl’s singles are included, along with well-chosen highlights from each of her five albums, the real treasures here are the B-sides, outtakes, alternate mixes, demos and live tracks. Heard together, they make a compelling case for MacColl as one of the most gifted singer/songwriters of her generation.
Those gifts were already obvious on her debut single, “They Don’t Know,” which Stiff Records released in June 1979, a few months before its author turned 20. An instant teen-pop classic lovingly evoking the bruised defiance of the Shangri-Las and other 1960s girl groups, it’s the kind of song that you know everyone’s going to adore within the first few seconds of play. And yet, in what would become a leitmotif for MacColl, gratification was deferred. Stiff’s distributors went on strike, making her record hard to find, and it quickly dropped off the U.K. charts. Only four years later did “They Don’t Know” become a hit, as covered by MacColl’s pal Ullman for her first single. Nothing against Tracey’s version, and I’m sure Kirsty didn’t mind getting the royalty checks, but the earlier take is the superior one.
MacColl’s next major attempt to dominate the airwaves was 1980’s “There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis,” which briefly reached the British Top 20. Cute, funny, up-tempo and utterly different from “They Don’t Know,” it evinces a fondness for honky-tonk country that would reappear often in her oeuvre—and a refusal to be pigeonholed that, though admirable, would work against her commercially. Eclecticism is the central trait of the album that followed “Chip Shop,” 1981’s Desperate Character. Eight of its 12 tracks appear on See That Girl, some in rough but revealing demo form; rockabilly, punk, dub, and ambient balladry coexist in slight discomfort with each other. The first of many MacColl forays into Latin music is here too, but “Mexican Sofa,” though intriguing from a groove and harmony perspective, gets let down by lyrics that are uncharacteristically strewn with embarrassing puns. “Tijuana cup of coffee?” indeed.
Desperate Character was a flop, so MacColl decided to retool stylistically once again. With the help of producer Dave Jordan (best known then for his work with the Specials), she cut a followup album, Real, in January 1983. Now the music was taking cues from the electro vogue represented by Depeche Mode, Eurythmics, Thomas Dolby and the Human League; the exotic synth tones and fretless-bass smears of “Camel Crossing” suggest that someone had been paying close attention to Japan’s Tin Drum. Listening now to the insistent choruses of “Bad Dreams” and “Annie,” it’s easy to envision them in the Top 40. But they never had a chance. MacColl’s second label, Polydor, cut her loose after the album was mixed and mastered, then shelved it for decades. See That Girl presents Real in its properly sequenced entirety for the first time.
Not long after this setback, MacColl met Steve Lillywhite, up-and-coming producer for Peter Gabriel, the Psychedelic Furs, XTC and U2. Within a year, they were married, and two boys arrived in due course. MacColl continued to make music over the next six years—including gems like “Terry,” “He’s on the Beach,” “I’m Going Out with an Eighty-Year-Old Millionaire,” and a definitive 1984 cover of Billy Bragg’s “A New England,” which finally landed her in the U.K. Top 10—but there were no albums. Motherhood and a burgeoning sideline as a session vocalist took precedence. The final disc of See That Girl consists solely of tracks by MacColl the sidewoman, many of them from this period. It’s fun and appropriate to have them here, but more often than not it’s a reminder that her own songs tend to be better than most other people’s. (There are exceptions, of course: Bragg’s “Greetings to the New Brunette,” David Byrne’s “Make Believe Mambo,” the Wonder Stuff’s “Welcome to the Cheap Seats,” and … a certain distemperate Christmas-ish number by the Pogues, which resides with the singles on disc one. If you know anything at all about MacColl, you know the song I’m talking about.)
Then, in 1989, MacColl re-emerged with what remains her masterpiece, Kite. “Innocence” opens the album in buoyant fashion. Singing with authority and saltiness over a jangly shuffle, MacColl is delicious as she rips into some unfortunate bloke: “It might just take a pilot to give you a natural high … When you eat, no one else does, and you always wonder why … I think I’m going to tell you, just give me 50,000 lire for my thoughts.” The pre-chorus makes a dramatic leap from the home key of G to a brilliant B-flat major-ninth chord, and the chorus ends with a high “yah!” that sounds like Bruce Lee about to unleash a kick to the groin. Liberated from misery, done with pretending, MacColl’s ready to tell it all straight, and boy, does it ever feel great.
Witty, tuneful and finely crafted, every Kite-era track on See That Girl is a keeper: “No Victims,” “Fifteen Minutes,” “What Do Pretty Girls Do?,” “Tread Lightly,” “The End of a Perfect Day.” Even the tunes that didn’t make the album stand out. MacColl’s rendition of the Smiths’ “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby” has a sly heat that out-Morrisseys Morrissey. And the B-side “Still Life” may just be my favorite song in the Kirsty catalog, a haunting meditation on the passage of time featuring iridescent acoustic guitar from Philip Rambow and the deathless couplet “Where are all the human beings? Have they been sent to Milton Keynes?”
Two more albums followed, Electric Landlady in ’91 and Titanic Days in ’93. Though neither is quite as excellent as Kite, they both have plenty of strong material. “My Affair” (Landlady) finds MacColl waxing polyamorous in front of a Cuban-style big band; it’s the diva moment she always had in her. “Angel” (Titanic) applies the trip-hop atmospherics of the time to a poignant ballad awash in spirituality, with mesmerizing results. Burdened by stage fright, MacColl didn’t play live so much in these years, but her set at the 1992 Glastonbury Festival, heard here in full, is a triumph.
Listen closely to Titanic Days, however, and you can feel the chill setting into MacColl’s personal life. Her marriage was collapsing; she and Lillywhite divorced in 1994. Six more years passed without an album. MacColl told friends that she wouldn’t make another one until she felt comfortable singing happy songs again. When that moment did finally arrive, she was moved to delve deeper into the musical styles of Brazil and the Caribbean. Her final disc, 2000’s Tropical Brainstorm, is mostly joyous and oriented toward the dance floor. It’s a fine listen, but the fusion of Croydon and Havana that MacColl was going for is, I think, more successfully achieved by a high-energy live set from London’s Jazz Café in October 1999 that closes disc six of See That Girl. Despite some dodgy background vocals, tunes like “Designer Life” and “England 2 Colombia 0” gain a sharper edge in concert.
We’ll never know what MacColl’s turn to the tropics would have yielded in the future, or whether it would have continued. All we can say for sure is that she traveled a long way, and left us with more than two decades’ worth of hugely enjoyable music. See That Girl presents her legacy flawlessly, in a handsome package compiled with care and organized around a long, informative essay by Jude Rogers (which, oddly but with clear intentionality, never mentions MacColl’s death).
A final note, about MacColl the lyricist. Time and again, she manages a delicate and difficult trick: pulling us in with her beguiling sense of humor—outrageous one-liners, pointed wordplay, clever putdowns—and then leveling us with a plain-spoken evocation of heartache and disappointment, love and empathy. In a Kirsty MacColl song, you get the whole picture. These few lines from “The End of a Perfect Day” seem to sum up the values in which her songwriting was grounded.
I should write out a hundred times
Put my hand on my heart and say
That I don’t want to lie, don’t want to lie
Don’t want to lie about the way it is
She never did.
The boat, named Percalito, shouldn’t have been there, as the area in which MacColl and her sons were diving was officially closed to watercraft. Found guilty of culpable homicide in 2003, the boat’s alleged pilot paid a small fine and served no prison time. Eyewitnesses claimed that he wasn’t the person at the controls when the accident occurred; the general consensus is that he took the fall on behalf of Percalito’s owner, a wealthy supermarket magnate, and that justice was never truly served.